Flapping Airplanes, an AI research lab that has not yet released a commercial product, has raised $1 billion in Series A funding at a reported $6 billion valuation, the company announced on October 21. The round was co-led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, with existing investors GV, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins also participating.
The valuation is about four times the $1.5 billion the company was valued at when it raised a $180 million seed round nine months earlier, and brings total funding to roughly $1.18 billion. Other backers named by the company include Nvidia, Valor, Atreides, Jump Trading Group and XTX Ventures.
The lab says it is working on making AI training more data-efficient and on a GPU framework that can run workloads such as training and inference at the same time — an effort to get more out of every chip while computing capacity remains scarce and expensive.
Why it matters
The deal is among the largest Series A rounds on record and shows how much capital investors are still willing to commit to AI research teams before there is revenue. It also comes as investors debate whether heavy spending on AI infrastructure will pay off quickly, which makes efficiency-focused bets like this one look as much like a hedge as a moonshot.
Sources: Tech Funding News, The Daily Star, Venturist.
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